Darrell Greer
Northern News Services

Rankin Inlet (Oct 17/05) - Kivalliq authours unveiled four new regional books in Rankin Inlet to celebrate Nunavut Literacy Week earlier this month.

The books have been sent to every school in Nunavut.

The unveiling took place at John Ayaruaq Library. Maggie Putulik read from her book alongside her granddaughter, Letticia Mercer, 5.

The song book (The Songs that Kukik Likes to Sing) is based upon Letticia's life and her love of singing.

Written in Inuktitut, the book features such well-known songs like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, You are my Sunshine, O Canada and Jingle Bells and many others.

Putulik, a former teacher in Chesterfield Inlet, has been working at the Department of Education's Teaching and Learning Centre in Rankin for almost 10 years.

She spends a great deal of her time on Desktop Publisher, working on books by Nunavut authors to be distributed to schools across the territory.

The books promote the use of Inuktitut and involve learning themes such as the evils of being a bully, and learning to respect your parents, teachers, fellow classmates and elders.

"Most of the books we work with come from our teachers in the different communities," says Putulik.

"We select books or stories we think are good for the kids in the classroom.

"When you read a book about respect and it talks of bullying and how if you want to have friends you have to show them respect - those are the types of themes we look for so the kids learn while they read."

While Putulik enjoys working with the efforts of other authors, she has always wanted to write her own book.

One day when she mentioned that desire to her husband Brian, he suggested writing the story about their granddaughter Letticia, and an idea was born.

"I didn't want to just write a song book, so I loved the idea of combining the two ideas together," she said.

"Kids learn about Letticia's life in the book and each song is from a different part of that life, such as singing O Canada at school and us always singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to her.

"Each song has special meaning to her life."